The Kingdom begins with a visually dynamic (almost TV commercial style) narrative of a brief history of 20th century US involvement in the Middle East, specifically the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself. It’s common knowledge, but the sort that gets swept away for being too morally ambiguous for the color coded terror system or […]
The least likable thing about Disturbia is the title; at least they didn’t call it Rear Window 2: 2 Scary 2 Believe. Disturbia is a cynical teenager’s dismissal of their lame, quiet, and very comfortably proportioned suburban neighborhood, even before the “disturbing” stuff even appears. If you can get past that and the slightly cheesy […]
Premonition’s previews give you that déjà vu feeling that it’s another Forgotten (did Julianne Moore even have a child) or another Godsend (is that kid really dead/his?) – and clearly no Sixth Sense (if you don’t know, I won’t ruin it). The premise is that each day Sandra Bullock wakes up to a different reality, […]
Jim Carrey has made many brave choices, as do so many comedians who parlay their comic skills into acting, and The Number 23 is one of them. I am a noisy advocate of his dramatic work, and this first time he attempting a psychological thriller is a departure from his previous excellent choices. […]
Alfonso Cuarón took the world of Harry Potter (Prisoner of Azkaban) and rendered it in three dimensions: dark, textured, and always moving. Even in that fantasy world, everything felt grounded, plausible. In Children of Men, a film set in the near future of 2027, Cuaron again grounds the story and images in recognizably 2006 imagery. […]
Shot in post-Katrina New Orleans, Deja Vu is a thriller with a twist dealing with an incident of domestic terrorism. It’s also, we find out, somewhat of a science-fiction paean to some of the more recent chaos theory and time-space continuum cosmology work being done in university settings. Don’t worry, it’s dumbed down […]
Aardman Animation is best known for their amazing and innovative claymation work, such as Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit films. Flushed Away was done with computer animation instead of painstaking stop motion, largely due to the practical concerns of animating with so much water, but it loses none of the fabled Aardman […]
M. Night Shyamalan has made a career of his handful of movies of creating a world according to his rules, with magic and pain and coincidence and purpose. How you have responded to his movies may vary, but there is no denying that his movies demand response. Lady in the Water is a bedtime story […]
Philip K. Dick wrote the novel on which this film was based in 1977, in the middle of his personal and extraordinary journey with drugs. His books can loosely all be described as trippy (as are the films made from them, such as Blade Runner and Minority Report), but this book’s paranoia, identity confusion […]
What safer haven for a supposedly controversial movie than in the hands of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks? I am sure we have all been debating the merits of the book as fiction and the resultant problems that the Catholic Church states it is causing them, etc, with all our friends and coworkers ad […]
